Double sided spreads

I find spreads a good way to do parts, with a large format printer you can print two pages per landscape and edge bind with medical tape for good stand ready music. Booklet only works for small number of pages because the nesting quickly gets out of hand. A downside to spreads is that for a lot of pages that also starts turning into a big accordion, by 10 pages it’s too much.

So I want to do double sided spreads. I think the trick is that halfway through it needs to double back, going backwards. For example imagine a 10 page piece. I think it would work something like this for Front-back

  1. Back=10
  2. 9
  3. 8
  4. 7
  5. 6

If you do a spread with simple double sided you get

  1. Back=2
  2. blank
  3. 7
  4. 6

Is there a Windows app that will shuffle them properly, or another way to do it?

See: PDF-BatchBooklet - Notation Central

Yes thanks I’ve tried that but unless I’m missing something I don’t see how it accomplishes what I want here.

Well what you are talking about is what commercial printers call imposition. Since booklet functions provided by Adobe Acrobat and similar PDF editors do not seem appropriate for your requirement, you need to use an imposing tool. That means a publishing program, designed for jobs like this. There are many to choose from. Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher and more. You need the full power of the pro tools to do the job I reckon. I do not know of any Windows standalone program that just does imposing and that’s all.

If this is a one-off I can do it in InDesign for you.

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I’m sorry, i’ve clearly misunderstood what you were asking for.
I’ll make sure it won’t happen again (till next time :wink: )

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Thanks, good information.

Well I’m just bushwhacking here and open to ideas - is there a better way? I have 12x18 or 9x12 Concert when landscape and folded. I could cut down the middle and comb bind, but that’s a bit of work, equipment and error prone to get a good cut.

I used to regularly staple 20 A3 sheets (80pp) together as a booklet. You need a decent stapler – ideally one with a ‘saddle’ that the folded sheets sit on.

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Would this help?

Woah that’s trippy, didn’t know that kind of thing existed. Problem is I use a heavyweight paper (130g I think) which really stands up to daily use, I’ve got a warmup workbook that’s been on my piano desk for years and is nicely aging and showing all the work I’ve put into it. Anyhow this paper doesn’t booklet well.

Might but I don’t like using webapps for whatever reasons.

Is anybody printing in Concert (standard part format in US at least)? Seems like it shouldn’t be hard, IIRC the SFSO library just kept it simple and printed legal I think and comb binded it. Looked crappy but yeah.